My first view of St. Thomas was a flash of volcanic rocks and chain link fence, quickly replaced by the tarmac of the airport runway. It doesn’t sound promising, but it was heavenly after the shock I had gotten about thirty seconds before, when I had innocently looked out the window and seen nothing but blue ocean, seemingly no more than twenty feet below our 757 jet.

My second view of St. Thomas was when I thanked the captain, visibly calmer after the flight had ended (this was, after all, just thirty days after September 11, and in Miami he had sternly warned us not to leave our seats without permission, or risk the intervention of the Air Force), and stepped down a slippery staircase through the mist of a tropical shower. I had barely recovered from the shock of actually walking on the tarmac – my experience with airports being limited to the more cosmopolitan venues of Orlando, Miami, and Washington – when we entered the arrivals area and found it to be nearly open-air (the roof and walls just didn’t quite meet!), with quiet steel-drum music piped in like Muzak and a friendly woman offering dixie cups of rum punch. I had never tasted rum punch and still haven’t, because as I made a beeline for the free alcohol my husband snatched at my elbow and pointed in another direction. There were two middle-aged women, one thin and blonde and one large and brunette, holding up a sign with our first names on it. Astonished, we made our way over and introduced ourselves. They were, respectively, one half of the owner/manager team and one half of the brand new assistant manager team of Sandcastle, the hotel we were en route to, and they were here to take us to Jost Van Dyke, the British island where the hotel sat on fabled White Bay.

Back at home in Florida, we had carefully marked out an itinerary that took us from Key West, to Miami International Airport, to St. Thomas, to the ferry at Red Hook, to Tortola’s West End, and from there we expected the hotel boat to take us to Jost Van Dyke. Now we could drop it, because Debby, the co-owner, had a rented van waiting for us outside. She had come to pick up their new assistants, she explained, who had arrived just an hour ago from Philadelphia.

We hastened to get our luggage and then ran through the now-pouring rain into the minivan. The weather was exactly like what we had left behind in South Florida: humid, gray, torrents of rain. Debby said it was unusual weather, and since we were being optimistic, we agreed that it would probably clear up in half an hour. We all knew that the tropics are unpredictable, but no one was saying anything. My husband and I were on our honeymoon: this was no time to be whiny and gripe about the weather.

Debby made a wrong turn and we ended up in St. Thomas’s rush hour. There were children in school uniforms swarming everywhere, and the narrow streets were packed with parents and tired islanders. We found the maze of streets and driving on the left unnerving enough, but once we left the downtown area and were speeding towards the eastern port of Red Hook, I was downright terrified. I had been brought up in Florida, and was used to long flat stretches and endlessly straight roads. The road we were on now curved in hairpins all around a high mountain, and the rain had made mud and puddles everywhere. Every downhill turn had me convinced I would die on the first day of my honeymoon. Little did I know that I was in for even worse on Jost Van Dyke.

The drive did convince us that we were missing nothing by planning to skip St. Thomas entirely on our week-long stay in the Virgin Islands. The city of Charlotte Amalie had all the charm of Nassau: great if you loved shopping and hectic cab rides, but over-all was not for the person aiming only to relax and enjoy sea breezes from a hammock strung between two palm trees.

The ferry ride to Tortola, on the pleasingly named Nubian Princess, was long and uneventful. We watched in awe as a woman loaded on board crates of Cheez-Its and premade hamburger patties. There are no huge price marts on the out islands of the BVI.; that is a uniquely American phenomenon on the uniquely American St. Thomas.

It was outside the customs office, a dockside cement block building at West End, where things got interesting. Bruce, the other half of Sandcastle’s owner team, had arrived with their little boat Off Island to take us all home in time for supper. We were eager to get to the hotel; at four p.m., we had been traveling for twelve hours, after a late wedding party the night before, and were soaking wet from the ferry ride in the unrelenting rain. We had our passports stamped – a thrilling moment for Cory and I, who had never left the country before – and hauled our suitcase back out to the dock. Where, unfortunately, Bruce could not get the boat started again.

We hung around for an hour or so. The rain momentarily cleared and we experienced our first Caribbean sunset, a soul-stirring collage of red, green, orange, purple, and all the colors in between, together with some fantastic cloud formations and the occasional flash of distant lightning. Cory and I instantly decided that the delay on Tortola was well worth it. The other members of our party did not seem so enthused: the new assistant was definitely wilting, and sat on the jutting window sill of the customs office, watching her husband tinker with Bruce on the boat engine. She watched our energetic sprints from the parking lot, where the view of the sunset was best, to our bag for the camera, and back again, with tired disbelief. It seemed to me that a person who wasn’t ready for constant trouble and unplanned adventures would find life in the West Indies to be a little hard to handle.

Eventually Debby rounded us up and, along with the new maid who had just arrived from Trinidad that evening, loaded us into their Land Rover, which lived in a little West End parking lot, and took us a little way down the shore line to a dubious looking pub and restaurant called The Jolly Roger. Could it get any better? I loved dive bars, and I loved dive bars on the water even more. Debby inquired of the proprietor, a friend of hers, if he had any rooms, but he was quite full, so she just took us into the restaurant and bought us a snack.

"Just a snack," she warned, "Because Oliver will have dinner waiting for us when we get home tonight." We had heard allusions to some sort of mysterious culinary god named Oliver already today, and had ordered our dinners by cell phone in St.Thomas, so we agreed to a light snack of coffee and some sort of crab/jalapeno/cream cheese concoction.

It was pitch dark by the time Bruce came sheepishly in to inform us that the boat had started, but that he didn’t trust it enough to take it to Sandcastle alone. He had made some inquiries, and someone named Rudy, who owned a market, inn and restaurant in Jost Van Dyke’s ambitiously titled Great Harbour, was going to come and pick us up in his lobster boat.

I managed to contain my grin from everyone but my husband, but this was just getting better and better! Between the rain, and the dead boat, and the introduction of a lobster boat, I couldn’t believe the adventure we were having. Of course I was dead tired, but I was also having an amazing time with all the curve balls this honeymoon was throwing us. To think that this morning we had been in miserable old Miami, getting nasty looks because we weren’t ordering our Egg McMuffins in Spanish!

The lobster boat arrived about twenty minutes later. The ladies huddled inside the little wheelhouse, and Cory, being a man, was stuck outside. They waved me inside. I shook my head and stayed out with my husband on the deck. I sank down alongside the railing and trailed a hand in the water. It was incredibly warm; I guessed it at about eighty-five degrees. The boat pulled out and we quickly reached open water and a quite terrifying speed. Waves were splashing up over the bow and all over me, and it started to rain again. I squealed and shivered and laughed; I was scared to death now but there was not a chance that I would let that on to the women inside. I scrunched up closer to Cory, grabbed his leg, and stared out at the darkness. All there was to see was a faint sprinkling of lights on Tortola and St. John, although to the far right St. Thomas lit up the sky like Manhattan.

Suddenly there was a flash of lightning that lit up the entire scene in ultraviolet glow. For a split second I could see the green islands, black rocks, white beaches, and the sea! That amazing Caribbean sea, dull and greenish in the afternoon rain but under the blue-white of the lightning it was the supernatural turquoise that the travel guide photos had promised. I had never believed that the sea could truly be that color, but in that second, I believed. Once more in that long, wet ride the sky lit up, and when I looked up I could see lightning splitting the sky directly above us, and traveling across the clouds from Tortola to St. Thomas. As a Floridian I considered myself a lightning connoisseur, but I had never, ever ever seen anything like this.

It was with some relief that I alighted at the dock at Great Harbour. I was drenched and cold and hungry, and the adventure was starting to wear a little thin. We got into Sandcastle’s Land Rover and set off for a horrifying car ride, which started with an ascent that purely terrified me, up a concrete road pouring water down like a waterfall, and then plunged downwards towards what islanders call "the Switchback," an unimaginable hairpin turn halfway down the steep hill. I had my suspicions, which I would confirm the following day, that if your truck didn’t make the turn, because, say, you were sliding down the hill with your brakes locking and your tires screaming because the rain was pouring down it like Victoria Falls, you would plunge through a jungled mountainside to a cliff that rose stark from the innocent pale waters of White Bay.

We survived the turn, not without much sweating on my part, and then cruised along a gently rolling roadway carved out of the mountainside and down a gravely drive, past a sign that read "Sandcastle," and finally pulled our suitcase out of the truck and stumbled towards a lit cottage with a bucket of water by the door. We had been uncertain about the presence of electricity and were pleased by the ceiling fan and the bedside lamps, but the louvered windows were letting in a chill, damp breeze that we hadn’t quite expected. We threw down our suitcase and used the bathroom, where the toilet sported a sign requesting that we only flush the toilet when absolutely necessary, and then ran through the rain to the open-air dining room, about thirty feet away on the edge of the beach.

There was quiet string music from the speakers, and candles guttering in the stiff wind off the beach. A tarp had been pulled down to block the rain. We sat down at the empty table and were started off on a four course meal that I simply cannot describe. There was soup, and salad, and a main course of meat and vegetables, and an astonishing chocolate mousse dessert. It was the finest meal I had ever tasted, up to that point. (The following night I would have a meal that would eclipse the first one, and on the following night an even better one, and so on and so forth.) At the other tables the three other couples were staying at the time were finishing their meals up; after they finished they walked over to a cozy bar area, went behind the bar and helped themselves to beer or wine, and sat down for a quiet game of cards. Because it was so incredibly dark, between the rain and the expanse of sea, we had no idea of our surroundings. Suddenly lightning lit up the sky again, and for a moment I saw waving coconut palms, white beach, pale water stretching out to the turquoise reef and then on and on to the distant mountain of St. John.

After dinner we said goodnight to Debby and Bruce, who were sitting with a bottle of wine with their new assistants. "Do we need to get a room key from you?" Cory asked, concerned that our door had been unlocked when we arrived.

"Oh no," Debby laughed. "We don’t lock our doors here."

by Natalie Keller Reinert

Caribbean cruise and travel magazine